Keyboard

Dear developers, USA is not whole world and whole world doesn’t use QWERTY keyboard layout. For instance, half of Europe uses QWERTZ (Y and Z swapped) which makes your game difficult to play. Player can play change keyboard layout, but is your game worth it?

I wouldn’t be so sure about half of Europe part. My job requires me to travel sometimes and I’ve been to countires like Poland, Germany, Spain and so on and none of my friends and fiends of friends that I know of uses qwertz keyboard and neither do any of the companies from what i’ve seen, mainly because it’s so inconvenient. Really, what’s the point, does it really make you type so much better if you buy qwertz keyboard and not qwerty? Yeah, there are a lot of qwertz keyboards in shops in Europe, doesn’t mean you have to buy them. As you said yourself, you can change keyboard layout. Devs can’t adapt to every keyboard that exists in the world, that would be ridiculous, so they use the most common one that a majority of people use.

Yes, Y works as Z but you had to inform me over the forum about that. There is no indication of it in tutorial or in game description so I simply didn’t try it.

@Erinar I’m quite sure that in Germany QWERTZ is more common than QWERTY and that french use AZERTY (devs, note that both Z and Y are in the top row on such keyboard). Also every country that was occupied by Germany during WWII uses QWERTZ either exclusively or 50%:50% with QWERTY. That with France is pretty much half of Europe, without exaggeration. I never claimed that such layout is better over QWERTY, it’s simply what you get when you a computer. Maybe you simply didn’t notice, maybe the offices where you have been are purposely USA friendly.

Devs don’t have to adopt every keyboard layout. It would be ideal if keyboard controls could be defined by positions of keys instead of characters but I’m yet to see an API that allows that. Well, little googling shows that there are some attempts in Silverlight with events that return both platform specific and nonspecific key code. In the mean time, how about rebindable keys?

Hey, do you like games? So do we — that’s what makes Kongregate the best source of free games online. We have thousands upon thousands of free online games, from both one-man indies and large studios, rated and filtered so you can play the best of the best. Read more »